Archaeology: European salt miners ate blue cheese and drank beer 2700 years ago

By Carissa Wong

Fungi present in faeces from Iron Age individuals who labored in salt mines in what’s now Austria counsel that folks had been consuming blue cheese and beer at the least 2700 years in the past.

There may be earlier proof for historic cheese, present in Early Bronze Age tombs in Western China from practically 4000 years in the past, however these fossilised faeces present the earliest proof that “folks produced cheese with even a flavour that’s present in blue cheese”, says Frank Maixner at Eurac Analysis in …